Month: November 2011

Brands require huge levels of energy. They need to be promoted, they need to be maintained, they need to be serviced … just to keep them going. And that can lead some to believe that that is all they need. Surely, if you invest enough energy in this brand, it will succeed. You see this in those interesting exchanges which begin, “We’re going to spend this … and we want to achieve this”. I would argue that the emphasis needs to be reversed, “To achieve this, we’re going to have to spend this …”. There are some important distinctions in the order of these statements. The first emphasises the spend (energy) and ties it, hopefully, to an outcome. The second statement begins with the outcome and attributes a required level of energy to achieve it. A lot of marketers put their hope in the first approach. Egged on by the planners, they spend up and then wait for the tide to come in. It’s a little like saying that you’ll put a certain motor in …

I have little doubt that news of a study by Facebook and Università degli Studi di Milano showing that Facebook has reduced the degrees of separation from six to four will inspire many to post advice on how and why to push everything Facebook’s way. According to the study, “99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (5 hops),” and the average “distance” between users is getting smaller over time. But I agree with Marc Schiller of Bond Strategy and Influence who pointed out in a recent interview posted on the AdWeek site that the key customer insights in a dynamic marketing environment come with brands adapting to movements in behaviours not shifts in technology. What really matters here is not that Facebook has reduced the separation between people, it’s that people have continued to employ Facebook to reduce the separation between each other. If you just focus on the how and not the why, there’s a very real risk of …

I always grin when people do that whole “any publicity is good publicity” thing. Because it’s simply not true. That observation it seems to me is predicated on a belief that awareness is the doyen of marketing, whereas I would argue that, in most cases, perception overwrites straight recall in terms of bankability. The temptation, if you follow the former line of thinking, is to assume that successful marketing is just about gaining attention. It’s an attitude that the advertising industry and the online world has done much to encourage. Gain attention and the business will follow. But a sex tape will get you plenty of eyeballs. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the foundations of a durable commercial model. Notoriety does work if your brand is built on a ‘bad boy’ reputation. As I’ve noted before, if you’re Gordon Ramsay, for example, or the Sex Pistols, then outrageous behaviours are both scandalous and intriguing. In these circumstances, people love to be shocked. Antics are in fact part of what people expect and buy …